rationalskepticism.org

cavarka9 wrote:
This implies that we are making a statement of physics, we are making a statement of mathematics of physics, that we must do physics on the bsis of ODE's, where we are determining the state of system in future by its state in the present. i.e. we are doing it based on the immediate instantaneous preceding state and NOT ON THE STATE MILLION YEARS AGO.This being the critical point, for if we reject ether then we must claim that light stated a million years ago, for how do we say that light was present just ahead of our eye a hundredth of a second ago".
It is here that ck raju claims that "poincare understood what einstein supposedly did not. That were we to reject ether in this sense, then we cannot go by ODE, that is the state in the preceding state but also on much older states;the systems would satisfy the equations of finite difference.The aether was invented to escape the breaking down of laws of general mechanics. Or functional differential equations as the author claims or state depended delay equations as some others call them."